Marketing: To DIY or to NOT DIY, that is the question

B&Q would have us all believe that the weekends (and especially the bank holiday weekends) are meant for DIY.

Time to get time to get all those jobs around the house and garden done, but not by employing someone is good at it, they want us all to pick up the proverbial paintbrush, or secateurs and do it ourselves.

Now DIY to be quite therapeutic, doing something for yourself feels good, indeed it can be a great way to let your mind escape from the troubles of the past week but what if you’re not very good at it? What if you have other things that need doing or maybe you just need some time off ?

The jobs needs doing, you know you’ll feel better once they’re done but what’s the alternative?

If money was no object, it would be simple, we’d all just get a local expert in and have them do it for us, but more often than not there are more things demanding your hard earned cash than you have to go around, so you have to decide what you can spend your money on and what you can’t.

Running a business is no different

There are the jobs you are good at, there are the jobs you aren’t so good at, there are jobs that need doing now and there are the jobs that you’ve been meaning to do for weeks, scratch that, jobs you have been meaning to do for months but you never get around to, so you have to prioritise.

You have to decide what you can add to your to do list, what you can outsource and what’s going to be relegated to the I’ll get around to it one day list!

Key to those decisions will be three things:

The time you or your team have available.

The skills you or your team possess.

And the money you have available to pay for the party to do it for you.

Okay so maybe you could find the time to do it, maybe you could have a go at it, but is completing the task the best use of your time? Would it be better spent doing other things? Are you going to get the results you want or will you be wasting your time (and of course time is money).

“I’ll just put in a few late nights, or catch up at the weekend”

All too often we don’t put much value against our own time, we believe we have this unending supply of it, , so if we do something ourselves it costs us nothing, but unfortunately it does.

Okay so bringing a specialist in costs you money but it can pay for itself threefold:

You get the job done right (well you are employing an expert)

You get the job done in a timely fashion (as you don’t keep putting it off)

You get to focus on what you really need to focus on.

It sometimes feels corny (but I guess that would partly be because we often tell our clients this) but we’re here to let you get on with what you’re good at, we here to help you get the best return on your efforts.

It’s not just about the experience we bring to the table

Of course we would never be so arrogant to you think our clients know nothing of sales and marketing, but what we can offer is experience gained over many years working in wide variety of industries across the globe.

However sometimes it’s not just about the skills we bring to the table, but that alternative perspective, that ability to help you look at things from a customer’s point of view, indeed it’s also about that extra set of hands we offer helping you to get things done.

So next time you find yourself struggling to get those “must-do” sales and marketing tasks done, step back, take a minute, you might be better off getting an expert in.